iOS

Apple today announced that it will be holding its annual music festival across 10 days during the month of September in London. Previously known as the iTunes Festival, this year’s show is known as the “Apple Music Festival” in reference the recently launched Apple Music service. It is also notably shorter than the typical 30 days of concerts. Pharrell Williams, One Direction, Florence + The Machine and Disclosure will be the headlining acts at this year’s festival, which takes place from September 19th to September 28th.

Apple’s Eddy Cue in addition to the main artists have commented on the announcement:

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Earlier this month, the United States Patent Office made a non-final ruling that one of Apple’s design patents for the original iPhone is invalid within Apple’s long-running lawsuit against Samsung, according to a report from FOSS Patents. This particular patent, as seen in the drawings above, references the overall design of the original iPhone launched in 2007. It is known as the “D’677” patent in court proceedings and legal documents. FOSS explains the reasoning behind the invalidation:

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Apple plans to hold one of its annual fall media events on Wednesday, September 9th to introduce the new iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus with Force Touch, and after many fits and starts, it appears that the long-awaited next-generation Apple TV will also be unveiled. We’ve been reporting on this upcoming model since 2014, as Apple has been planning to update its set-top-box with support for an App Store for quite some time.

Earlier this year, Apple had locked in a June WWDC debut for both the new Apple TV hardware and software upgrades, but the company ultimately decided to delay the introduction until the fall. While some had speculated that the announcement was pushed back due to a lack of content deals, we are told that the delay was internally attributed to a concern over compromising iOS 9 engineering resources, as the latest OS release is focused at least as much on polish as on new features.

Why would the new Apple TV potentially take away resources from iOS 9? According to sources, this new Apple TV model, codenamed J34, will be the first model to run a full-blown iOS core. Specifically, the new Apple TV operating system will be a TV-optimized version of iOS 9. In addition to the new hardware inside, running iOS 9 will give the new Apple TV a series of benefits over the current model. Below, we explore what users can expect from Apple’s next-generation living room product.

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Artwork by shoplemonde.de

While we’ve reported extensively on what to expect from Apple’s next generation iPhone 6S — including Force Touch in May and what enhancements it offers last week — a fresh set of rumors are floating around today regarding the pending iPhone model ranging from expected, known, and spoofed. We’ll unpack each one below:
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While a larger iPad Pro and a thinner, more powerful iPad mini are likely in the cards for this fall, Apple’s flagship 9.7-inch tablet sounds like it will be left out of this year’s update cycle. In a new report today, hit-or-miss Taiwanese technology trade website Digitimes says that Apple is not preparing a third-generation iPad Air for this fall. This follows up on a report from earlier this year that claimed that such a tablet would not debut until 2016.

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Apple has quietly added a new data restore feature to iCloud.com, enabling users to rollback accidentally deleted documents, calendar changes and contacts. The new ‘Restore Files’, ‘Restore Contacts’ and ‘Restore Calendars’ features are hidden in iCloud.com Advanced Settings pane.

Seemingly unrelated to iCloud backup, Apple shows snapshots of your recently deleted documents and lets you put them back onto iCloud Drive. This means there is now a way to recover accidentally deleted iCloud documents for the first time, because there is no equivalent to the Trash folder in iCloud.

Similarly, Contacts restoration shows timestamped snapshots of  your iCloud contacts database. Restoring to an earlier version reverts all changes made since the backup date. Unlike with files, you cannot individually restore single contacts. The same is true for Calendars.

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Update: Apple appears to have now disabled external testing in iTunes Connect again after briefly enabling it this afternoon.

[tweet https://twitter.com/amitnkalra/status/631992910771130368 align=’center’]

When Apple updated the TestFlight app for iOS 9 compatiblity earlier this month, it came with the caveat that developers could only submit iOS 9 betas to members of their own teams. Today, however, the company has enabled external testing, allowing developers to start pushing iOS 9-ready betas to any users.

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Apple has released an official iOS update for all users with iOS 8.4.1 now available. The update follows the major iOS 8.4 release which included an all-new Music app with Apple Music, the new subscription music service, plus Beats 1, Apple’s Internet-based radio station with live DJs. Apple initially started testing the changes in iOS 8.4.1 with developers in mid-July. The maintenance update includes several issue fixes for Apple Music and Beats 1. 
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Google today has started rolling out an update to its iOS app for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. The update, the first significant update to come to the app in some amount of time, bumps it to version 7.0 and includes a handful of notable new features.

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Flight tracking apps have been popular on iOS for as long as the platform had the App Store, and this fall Apple is baking a key function of those apps right into the operating system. A little known feature called ‘flights data detector’ is included in both iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan but was not highlighted on stage during Apple’s WWDC keynote. As one Reddit user highlighted, the feature lets iOS automatically detect when text is referencing a flight and allows users to actually check on the flight’s status and progress with an attractive interface. Here’s how it works on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac…
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One of iOS 9’s marquee additions is support for split-screen applications on the iPad. This allows users to operate two iPad applications simultaneously, side-by-side. However, due to processor limitations of older iPad models, the full 50/50 split-view functionality is currently only present on the iPad Air 2 thanks to the device’s A8X processor. However, with the help of developer Hamza Sood, we have discovered that the feature may soon be expanding to the iPad mini…

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Every time Apple is expected to release an S-series iPhone — the 3GS, the 4S, the 5s, and now the 6S — pundits rush to discount the value of each anticipated new feature, claiming that it won’t be enough to boost iPhone sales. Yet historically, every prediction of iPhone sales peaks or declines has been wrong: each iPhone, whether a big “tick” or small “tock” on Apple’s upgrade schedule, has outsold its predecessors. Even without form factor or screen changes, speed sold the iPhone 3GS, Siri boosted the 4S, and Touch ID and camera improvements helped the 5s. (In S years, improved distribution, new color options, and price and capacity tweaks have made a big difference, too.)

This week, analysts and pundits have co-opted my colleague Mark Gurman’s scoop that Force Touch on the iPhone 6S will be used for shortcuts across iOS, suggesting that Force Touch isn’t going to be exciting enough to make people upgrade. That’s true, but also so obvious as to be ridiculous: Apple certainly won’t pitch a pressure-sensitive screen as the iPhone 6S’s marquee new feature. Force Touch debuted in the Apple Watch, but it’s not even mentioned on the first Apple Watch page on Apple.com, instead showing up in the fifth paragraph of the “Technology” page. It’s similarly found only paragraphs down on the page of the 12″ MacBook where it made its Mac debut.

With the notable exception of the iPad mini 3, Apple never releases new devices with only one new feature to hook customers. Even a month before it’s announced, it’s a virtual certainty that the iPhone 6S will arrive with camera improvements and faster processors, most likely a new color option, and Force Touch as one of many small but nice additions. So long as Apple gets distribution and international pricing right, the iPhone 6S is going to do just fine…

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While Force Touch on the Apple Watch allowed Apple to add an additional layer of buttons to a small display, the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus screens don’t lack for either real estate or buttons. So why would Force Touch be desirable on larger displays? Following up on our May report that Force Touch is coming to Apple’s next iPhones, sources who have used the iPhone 6S have provided new details on how Force Touch works and feels under iOS.

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Plex, the popular media service that offers apps on nearly every platform, has today revealed the latest iteration of its iOS application. With the latest update, the app has gained several new features.

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The iPhone 6 was the iPhone many had long been waiting for, offering a larger screen size and NFC support for Apple Pay. Unsurprisingly, it opened to record sales, and has continued to break sales records ever since.

But Apple’s ‘tick tock’ strategy –a major new iPhone one year and an updated model based on the same form factor the following year – means that the company has to work much harder to sell its S models. With little visual difference (and the average mass-market customer oblivious to processor upgrades), Apple has to rely on a headline new feature to persuade people that it’s worth the upgrade.

For the last couple of S models, Apple has offered pretty convincing reasons to buy: the 4S gave us Siri, and the 5s introduced Touch ID – both appealing features that were easy for non-tech customers to understand. But if the rumors are correct that Force Touch is the headline new feature of the iPhone 6S, this is one of five reasons I think the company’s rumored ambition to make 90M units by the end of the year could be a tough number to turn into sales … 
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We shared yesterday that Apple’s newly released fifth developer beta version of iOS 9 adds a new collection of colorful, Retina showcasing default wallpapers for the iPhone. Settling on a new wallpaper, or in this case a whole set of gorgeous imagery, usually mean development on the operating system itself is wrapping up ahead of a public release sometime the following month.

For non-developers and iPhone users not risking stability on their daily driver in favor of new eye candy and features, though, the several week waiting period for iOS 9 to be finalized and released ahead of the new iPhone 6S can make waiting to try those new wallpapers frustrating. To remedy that, we’ve shared downloadable versions of each new wallpaper below so you can sport the iOS 9 look on your iPhone without the occasional bugs that accompany beta versions of iOS:
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